Pages

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Creating an Internal Knowledge Base

After watching a Webinar hosted by Ellyssa Kroski, blogger at iLibrarian, I was inspired to set up an example knowledge base for my department.  I was intrigued by the way wikis could be used for project management and the sharing of information. My department is moving towards more collaboration, but we don't currently have a centralized way to disseminate and share information for departmental and group projects.

In this Webinar, Ellyssa mentioned several wiki platforms and demonstrated PBworks. I am not personally a fan of the PBworks layout, so I decided to take a look at some of the other platforms. I looked into Wet Paint, but the parent company seems to have changed into a gossip Web site. I liked PmWiki (the library I worked at in grad school used that platform), but as far as I could tell the platform needed to be uploaded to the library server.  At this point, I just wanted to create an example wiki, so I wasn't ready to ask our systems department to add a wiki platform.

In the end I settled on Google Sites, as I could easily create something and have it hosted for free. I chose a simple template with a left navigation bar (I prefer clean simple Web sites) and customized the background photo. I thought about what I wanted included in the wiki and how to organize information into a small number of categories. For my top level of categories, I chose Courses, Projects, Resources, and Training.



Under the Courses heading, I listed all of the departments that we provide instruction for, with the idea that each instruction librarian could include a short summary of the instruction he or she provides for that department. I didn't want the information to be a repeat of what we already have on our Web site or in our LibGuides, but rather a centralization and summarization so that information can easily be found in one place. For example, I summarized which classes I provide instruction for and included a link to our SACs LibGuide that provides a more detailed account of what I do semester by semester as well as links to course LibGuides which include PowerPoints and materials.

Under the Projects heading, I created pages for department, shared, and individual projects.  On these pages, we can update our progress on our projects and also see what others are working on in order to collaborate and share ideas if we are working on similar projects. There's also an ability to add comments, which I found useful. I saw that the PRIMO site of the month focuses on Endnote, so I added the link as a comment on our Endnote Update project page, so I would remember and so that my coworker could see the link too.

Under the Resources heading, so far I've included links for interesting articles and travel tips. My coworkers often e-mail interesting articles, but I find that they get lost in my e-mail if I don't add them to Endnote or another program. I thought that if someone had an article to share with the department, he or she could add a link to it on the wiki. I'm currently categorizing the articles by subject, but I imagine this could become cumbersome if many articles are added. I included travel tips as my department travels to satellite locations to teach. Right now, this page contains tips like when teaching in Seoul, you can take the KAL Limousine bus from Incheon Airport into the city.  Finally, I included a training page in case we want to move our training materials online.

Overall, I felt that Google sites was easy to use and somewhat customizable. One thing I didn't like, however, is that each page did not immediately include a "last updated" time.  While you can add a recent activity link to your site's side bar, you must manually type in when the page was last updated .

What do you all think? Have you set up wikis/knowledge bases for your library or your self? Which platform did you use? What kind of categories did you use to divide your information?

5 comments:

  1. I didn't realize how much I relied on a reference wiki until I started working at a library without one. A website was created a few months ago because of the problems you mentioned with uploading it to the server, but only the admin of the site can update it, which is obviously not ideal. Perhaps I will try out Google Sites to see if it sticks. I like the idea of using a wiki for more than reference, though. It's easy for knowledge & experience to get lost (or incessantly repeated) when there's no place for it to live. Thanks for the example!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I miss having a reference/circ wiki too! There are so many little procedures that only one or two people know the answer to. Maybe we can look into starting a wiki here. I also like the idea of having instruction documents on a wiki - people put so much work into their instruction sessions, and it doesn't usually get shared or recorded. If the wiki is private, do people need to log in using their Google accounts? Some people might resist using their Google accounts for professional things, either because they're generally anti-Google or because they don't want to use shared computers to sign into their Google account which contains all their mail, etc. I wouldn't mind using a Google Sites wiki from my office, but I wouldn't want to sign on from the shared reference computers (which are also the circ computers, so rebooting is not practical).

    ReplyDelete
  3. I agree. I didn’t realize how much I would miss the reference wiki until I didn’t have one anymore. I thought about trying to start one here, but I was worried about the upkeep especially as I am not actually in the reference department.

    When I showed the wiki to my department concerns were raised about using personal Google accounts to access work related items. I created a generic Google account that could be shared among the department members, but I believe this would have limited how many people could be logged in at the same time. Additionally, the wiki might be hard to access from any computer if a user has the 2 step authentication process set up for Google.

    In the end, we decided not to use Google sites. Luckily my library is moving our Web site to a Word Press platform, so that librarians can have more control over updating our content, and I also imagine so that our web master is not being constantly overworked with requests.

    Our department is one of the first to move to Word Press, so I’ve been working a lot with our web master to customize our departmental site to what we need. Once the structure of the site is finished, each librarian will have his or her own log in information. When librarians in our department view our public department site as logged in administrators, an extra menu will appear with all of the content that I had originally created in the Google Sites wiki. This is all still in progress, but one of the benefits of using Word Press is that our Web master will be able to create custom post types for us, so that the entries in the wiki will be taggable posts which can be sorted rather than static pages.

    I’d love to hear if you all end up starting wikis. Keep me updated!

    ReplyDelete
  4. I started a wiki for my team as well! We are using it to track projects and as a place to put all the information we have to share with each other in one place, instead of emailing it. I am definitely the one that is most excited about it (also the only one who attended an iSchool), but my team is using it. I lucked out because Cisco has its own wiki platform secured on the internal network.

    Keep working on the wiki!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's awesome! I'm still waiting for our custom post types (we're a low priority project right now) but I'll try to write a new post with screen shots when the wiki is all done.

      Delete